British biographer Sarah Bradford is taking on the wicked Lucrezia Borgia as her next subject, in a book signed jointly by Viking Penguin's Wendy Wolf here and Juliet Annan in London; they bought world English rights from agent Gillon Aitken.... Putnam's David Highfill has signed a writer of legal thrillers, David Ellis, whose Line of Vision was nominated for an Edgar, for a second, Life Sentence; he bought world rights from Jeff Gerecke at JCA.... A first novel by Britain's Bella Bathurst, author of a book on Robert Louis Stevenson's family, was bought for the U.S. and Canada by Houghton's editor-at-large Elaine Pfefferblit; her buy of Special, a book about teenagers in trouble, for a Mariner original next spring, was made from Kathleen Anderson of Anderson Grinberg.... Basic's Jo Ann Miller bought a book by Washington Post columnist Abigail Trafford called My Time, about the period of life between upper middle age and old age; it was a low-six-figure buy from agent Gail Ross, for publication in fall 2003.